We're starting some brief summaries from our monthly Parish Church Council meetings - the group responsible with the vicar for the overall leadership and direction of St James' by the Park.

One of the new PCC members, Helen Bathard, writes ...

We started our evening by listening to three people sharing their stories of how they came to faith in Christ - we've been doing this each meeting recently. It's wonderful to hear how God has been at work in so many different ways.

The majority of the evening was taken up with getting the newbie members of the PCC (Helen Bathard, Sam Taylor, Hannah Brown and Peter Craggs) up to speed with what's been done so far on the buildings review. It was quite clear that although an option study was presented to us 18 months ago, there are a lot of hurdles to cross in terms of council, excavations, local community and funding. We did agree the next step in the process or working out what might be possible to do on the St James' by the Park site: a mini archaeological dig in the graveyard and a bat survey. We'll let you know when we've got the results of those surveys.

​We then spent some time looking at mission statements from other churches, and talking about what our current mission is. As a group we're considering whether our mission really reflects our heart.

As it was Amy Adeniran's last PCC meeting before her maternity leave starts and curacy ends, we finished by praying especially for her - and her baby!